Social Life in the Insect World eBook

Was I not right to insist? An apparently insignificant
fact has led to the authentic proof of a fact that
the Larinidae had already made me suspect. The
long-beaked weevils have an internal probe, an abdominal
rostrum, which nothing in their external appearance
betrays; they possess, among the hidden organs of
the abdomen, the counterpart of the grasshopper’s
sabre and the ichneumon’s dagger.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE PEA-WEEVIL—­BRUCHUS PISI

Peas are held in high esteem by mankind. From
remote ages man has endeavoured, by careful culture,
to produce larger, tenderer, and sweeter varieties.
Of an adaptable character, under careful treatment
the plant has evolved in a docile fashion, and has
ended by giving us what the ambition of the gardener
desired. To-day we have gone far beyond the yield
of the Varrons and Columelles, and further still beyond
the original pea; from the wild seeds confided to the
soil by the first man who thought to scratch up the
surface of the earth, perhaps with the half-jaw of
a cave-bear, whose powerful canine tooth would serve
him as a ploughshare!

Where is it, this original pea, in the world of spontaneous
vegetation? Our own country has nothing resembling
it. Is it to be found elsewhere? On this
point botany is silent, or replies only with vague
probabilities.

We find the same ignorance elsewhere on the subject
of the majority of our alimentary vegetables.
Whence comes wheat, the blessed grain which gives
us bread? No one knows. You will not find
it here, except in the care of man; nor will you find
it abroad. In the East, the birthplace of agriculture,
no botanist has ever encountered the sacred ear growing
of itself on unbroken soil.

Barley, oats, and rye, the turnip and the beet, the
beetroot, the carrot, the pumpkin, and so many other
vegetable products, leave us in the same perplexity;
their point of departure is unknown to us, or at most
suspected behind the impenetrable cloud of the centuries.
Nature delivered them to us in the full vigour of
the thing untamed, when their value as food was indifferent,
as to-day she offers us the sloe, the bullace, the
blackberry, the crab; she gave them to us in the state
of imperfect sketches, for us to fill out and complete;
it was for our skill and our labour patiently to induce
the nourishing pulp which was the earliest form of
capital, whose interest is always increasing in the
primordial bank of the tiller of the soil.

As storehouses of food the cereal and the vegetable
are, for the greater part, the work of man. The
fundamental species, a poor resource in their original
state, we borrowed as they were from the natural treasury
of the vegetable world; the perfected race, rich in
alimentary materials, is the result of our art.

If wheat, peas, and all the rest are indispensable
to us, our care, by a just return, is absolutely necessary
to them. Such as our needs have made them, incapable
of resistance in the bitter struggle for survival,
these vegetables, left to themselves without culture,
would rapidly disappear, despite the numerical abundance
of their seeds, as the foolish sheep would disappear
were there no more sheep-folds.